Incline My Heart

A thirty-day Anglican morning devotional, self-published in print and digital. It was written against a specific gap: most devotional material aimed at young Christians is thin — three verses and a vague application point — and assumes the reader already knows how to pray. Incline My Heart assumes the opposite, and lets the liturgy carry the reader rather than asking them to generate devotion from nothing.

Each day follows a sevenfold structure drawn from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer's Morning Prayer, Lancelot Andrewes' Preces Privatae, and the broader Daily Office tradition: confession, praise, Scripture meditation, creed, intercession, self-examination, self-dedication. Each office runs roughly twenty minutes. The text is interleaved with patristic and Anglican sources — Augustine, Andrewes, Herbert — and uses traditional liturgical notation (versicles and responses, rubrics) rather than flattening it into prose.

Sole author, editor, typesetter, cover designer, and publisher. Wrote the full manuscript, sourced and verified the patristic and BCP material, ran the editorial pass, formatted the interior, designed the cover, handled the publishing and tax setup, and built the distribution.

The manuscript went through a full structural and line edit before typesetting. Interior layout was done in LibreOffice, chosen for control over the liturgical spatial formatting the text depends on — versicle and response symbols, indented rubrics, and the visual separation between movements that makes an office readable at 6am.

The cover was built as a full wrap (front, spine, back) in Canva, using AI-generated source imagery refined into a green leather texture. Getting it through KDP's validation took several passes; the rejections traced to bleed handling in Canva's PDF export, and were resolved by extending the background to the full canvas edge before exporting as PDF Print with crop marks and bleed enabled.

For the ebook, EPUB and DOCX were both tested and both failed — reflowable formats destroy the spatial layout the liturgy relies on. The eventual solution was Kindle Create with Print Replica, preserving the fixed layout.

Published through Amazon KDP with a free KDP ISBN, paperback priced at $16.99 USD in the 60% royalty tier, returning roughly $6.57 per copy after print costs. Publishing setup included the W-8BEN, reducing US withholding to 5% under the Australia–US tax treaty.

Before publication the manuscript went out for pastoral review, prompted by a suggestion from a SOW leader. Given that the theology leans High Anglican and sacramental in a context where much of the readership is evangelical, that review was both a check on theological integrity and a matter of accountability.

Published and in distribution across three channels: author copies ordered at roughly $7.19 AUD each and sold in person with a handwritten note and a personalised verse for each recipient; church channels, primarily Christ Church St Laurence — where the theological fit for a BCP-based devotional is strongest — and the SGHAC 9:30 congregation bookstall; and direct digital sale of the PDF through riqle.com.au via Stripe, with the physical edition linked out to Amazon rather than fulfilled in house.